The Wall Street Journal reports that the Department of Defense has formalized its doctrine for responding to cyber-attacks. (Hat tip: Thinh Nguyen.) Unsurprisingly, the Pentagon has adopted a pragmatic posture of equivalence: cyber-attacks of sufficient impact could meet with a kinetic response. In other words, logic bombs might prompt America to employ real ones. The […]

Normally, bloviating about security follows a simple rule: disagreeing with Bruce Schneier = wrong. But I do disagree with Bruce about the recent decision by security researcher Dillon Beresford to withhold details about a vulnerability he discovered in Siemens’ SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition Systems) controllers. These are the same type of systems that […]

Interesting piece in today’s NYT about whether a tattoo can be a copyrighted work, subjecting copyists to liability if they give somebody else the same tattoo. The work in question is alleged to be an original work of authorship (although derived from Maori art) “fixed” in the “tangible medium” of MIKE TYSON’S FACE. Would this […]

Leon Neyfakh has a fascinating article in the Boston Globe on Jane Yakowitz‘s paper “Tragedy of the Data Commons.” It traces the rise of both privacy concerns and the debate over who owns data, and outlines her argument in favor of granting immunity from privacy-related legal liability to encourage contributions to the public commonweal of […]

I will save my co-blogger Derek Bambauer from tooting his own horn by tooting it for him: Paul Ohm has written a very lovely review on Jotwell of Derek’s forthcoming law review article, Condundrum. From Paul’s review: I have never felt entirely satisfied by a single work about cybersecurity, at least not until now. Derek […]

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Because it was only noted in a few news outlets (like this and this), I doubted it, but then I went and looked at the Patent and Trademark Office trademark search site myself, and it is true: Disney has filed an application for trademark rights over the name “Seal Team 6.” This is, of course, […]

Teaching Civil Procedure and Copyright together again during the just concluded semester, which I have not done since 2007, made for a study in contrasts. As we teach it at Cincinnati, the second semester Civ Pro course is an in-depth examination of some of the trickiest and most important provisions to be found in the […]

If you are looking for a fascinating and enlightening time-suck (and my fellow academics now grading final exams, I am looking at you), then I have just the thing for you. The Berkman Center recently relaunched Media Cloud. The site describes it as “an open source, open data platform that allows researchers to answer quantitative […]

A Utah federal court has dismissed a complaint by Koch Industries — the giant privately-held conglomerate of the politically controversial billionaire Koch brothers — over a prank press release issued in the company’s name. (EFF blogged about the court’s opinion and also posted a PDF of it here.) The dispute began when anonymous pranksters calling […]

Google is set to debut its cloud-based music service, called (creatively) Google Music. This isn’t revolutionary after Amazon launched its service. What makes it fun for IP nerds like me is that Google initially tried to strike licensing deals with the major music labels, but when they failed, they altered their service (to avoid the […]